


Faith and Service, Adoration, Duty, and Observance

by kittu9



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Duty, F/M, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:21:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History doesn't always tell the whole truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith and Service, Adoration, Duty, and Observance

**Author's Note:**

> Written October 2004, before we had ANY backstory to work with. Those were the days! Fairly substantial revisions have been done, but the gist of the story is unchanged. Looking over it now, I may do a remix—but this one has a special place in my heart.
> 
> Title taken from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” (full quote at end).

In the eventual history books and biographies of Roy Mustang, Liberator of Central, Riza Hawkeye will not warrant her own chapter—nor will she become a tabulated footnote in an index that no one will read. Instead, her presence will be explained in a brief paragraph. From then on, she will be referenced vaguely and only when it is necessary to expostulate upon her kill count (which is believed to be an alarming twelve-oh-two. Reports may have been exaggerated, although no one is ever sure. She is said to have played her cards, so to speak, close to her chest indeed, and the people she shot certainly didn’t do much talking after the fact).

She was unobtrusive and observant, and so is thought to be a devoted—though not particularly exceptional—disciple.

It will be written that the idea to change the world belonged to Mustang, who was initially supported by Maes Hughes (until his untimely death; circumstances and details surrounding the Hughes assassination are sketchy at best, and outright obscure if anything else).

Hawkeye will be perceived—correctly—as a faithful soldier with good aim, a face in the crowd; background noise.

What historians will not write is this: how it was Hawkeye who pushed Mustang onward after Hughes' death.

How she stood over him and waited, watching him until every last document was signed and initialed (and she kept watching him, even after the papers were put away).

How she learned to use a gun better than anyone else ever had, to make up for his abysmal aim with a pistol.

There are other things as well, too nebulous to make their way into even the most unauthorized of biographies—the sacrifice she made of her career in favor of his, for instance. Riza Hawkeye ended her time in the military at a rank that made little sense when one considered her experience; no one ever remarks on it, or seems to notice that something held her down, or back. She was very, very good at what she did, and made very little fuss about what needed to be done.

For instance, that time, in the rain, she pushed him aside and drew her pistol on Scar the Ishvarite ("You're useless in the rain, sir."). In this action, she may have reminded him of his human weaknesses. Perhaps at this moment, too, she was merely a soldier; there is little need for love on the job, and any text will allow that Mustang was not just a job, he was a calling, a man who demanded so much that he conceivably burnt the desire for any other work out of the mind and body.

They will make no notation of the black and white dog that she took in and who waited outside her door each and every waking day; that she knew exactly how Mustang liked his coffee—hot, black, strong, and sweet; or how she smiled (rarely and guardedly, as if afraid the show her opinion, or as if she had no opinion at all).

History will never reveal, with sharp clarity or soft focus, the way that Mustang would fall asleep at his desk and how Hawkeye would drape his discarded coat about his shoulders before sitting down in the corner of his office, away from the light and with her weapon drawn, quiet and alert. Every day of his life was approved overtime, and she was a shadow dogging his steps; this is unquestioned.

And they will never write about her steadfast and abiding love for him, of her frightening devotion. They could never in a thousand pages of records reveal how this arrogant, reckless man, consumed with a dangerous ideal, watched her when no one else was looking—with a reverence that bordered on awe.

Or of how, one night, when it was too dark and too late and too soon until morning for the soft, befuddling haze of alcohol or careless sex, he sought out her hand with trembling fingers. How he clung to it as if she was uncorrupted and safe, the one true thing left breathing in the world.

How she, in a surprising act of tenderness, raised his fingers to her lips and kissed them, and kissed his face and throat until he let out a quivering sigh and chuckled so deeply that she could feel the reverberations of his larynx in the bones of her chest.

How he pulled her to him and swore that the new world order would be worth it and they would be able to live, really live!

—But most of all, history will never record things that it cannot comprehend or accept, like charity, devotion, and the movements that accompany the deepest of faiths. History is not capable of recording this in perfect, living detail, as if such things were really true, or could be. History is a creation of distance, uncomfortable with near-sighted closeness; often it is as dry and softly tenuous as a handful of ashes, sifting through the cracks and crevices of the palm and out of sight.

It is possible that Hawkeye might have approved all of these edits. After all, these details confused the issue more than it already was, and irrelevant clutter is frowned upon in reports. Riza Hawkeye will not venture beyond her place in the record, because to do so would occlude it, would alter its purpose; hers is not the story that people will look after, or tell.

Even though more than perhaps anyone else, she understood that some objectives were never clear and certain—only irrational, heedless, and irrevocably good.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  _"It is all to be made of sighs and tears; . . . all to be made of faith and service: . . . all to be made of fantasy, all made of passion and all made of wishes, all adoration, duty, and observance, all humbleness, all patience and impatience, all purity, all trial, all observance; . . . I'll not fail, if I live." —Silvius, **As You Like It**_   
> _, V. II. 90-132_


End file.
